re: What is your opinion on reintroduction of predators like wolves in the United States?

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our lack of focus on renewable energy comes to mind.

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You should change your screen name from Bison to Sheep

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people who advocate for releasing apex predators back into the environment don’t live anywhere near the aforementioned “environment”.

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This.

Im against it. Predators compete with me for the game I like to hunt. Simple as that.

An ecologist disputes how wolves improved yellowstone....

Or at least the simplification shown in the video...

wolves

I don't know enough to have an opinion but sounds like an opportunity to introduce livestock guardian dogs.....

The Biden/Harris admin has been introducing dangerous predators into the US the last 4 years to disastrous results

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what mistakes we are making now: our lack of focus on renewable energy comes to mind. Will we keep drilling and fracking until we have little to no resources left?

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So now you want all those cows back? Thought their farts are worse for the environment than my car?!

And BTW - there is enough coal in Minnesota alone to fuel our country from 250 years

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Purports? People go to school for this shite and spend their summers doing field work in these habitats. They do studies, gather data, and consider factors that you aren’t capable of “thinking” your way into.

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Alright Tonto. Settle down.

I'm a trump voting republican, but as an Ecologist by training, this is one area where I lean a little more to the left. I also live in a state where where they are talking about releasing more wolves, or at least letting them migrate in from other areas.

For wolves, there is no doubt that their reintroduction into the the greater Yellowstone ecosystem has been a good thing. Not only did it help control the Deer/Elk populations which were over carrying capacity and leading to overgrazing in areas of the park, but there were several other unanticipated benefits as well. One of these was the improvement of native cutthroat trout populations because the Elk/Deer no longer overgrazed the streams where they spawned.

As someone who travels the rural intermountain west for work I understand the frustration from the ranchers who's livestock is occasionally taken by predators. However, these ranchers do get compensated for their losses by the federal government (as anything with the feds, that can be a P.I.T.A.) But the other side of their opposition is that many of these ranchers supplement their incomes by doing guided Deer/Elk hunts in the fall. The wolves have moved the elk higher into the mountains making the chance of success much lower for many of these guided hunts. Many clients pay five figures and up to these outfitters and they are less willing to do this in their chance of success are diminished. That aspect of the opposition is rarely talked about. When I was heavily involved in the fly fishing scene (15 years ago) I got to know many of the players on both sides of wildlife management game.

So my honest opinion is this. Yes, I think predator reintroduction has it's place in wildlife management. But it has to be done in the right places. For example, there are likely a few lone wolves in the High Uinta's of Utah that have migrated down from the greater Yellowstone area through Wyoming. But that's an appropriate place for them. It's 500K acres of wilderness. Putting them in the Wasatch Cache National forest wouldn't be appropriate, because while there's wilderness there, it's also surrounded by almost 2,000,000 people in Urban and suburban Ut.

I can't specifically speak to grizzlies specifically as I don't know enough about the science to make an informed decision. I think my gut reaction is that bears in general are more omnivores than carnivores. My uninformed opinion is that this subtle difference is enough to increase the likely hood of negative human/animal interactions. But again, I don't have enough info to back that up. Also I would guess that many of the areas where they want to reintroduce grizzlies are also home to black bears. I would guess, and it's just a guess, that there is enough overlap in the ecological niches of the two species that black bears would serve much of the same role as grizzlies in these areas.

I don’t know much about it, but Rogan had Diane Boyd on the podcast and she gave a lot of information on the wolf populations and history. Very interesting. I do think we should have some around. Per the podcast, wolves aren’t the roving bands of people hunters that is sometimes portrayed.

We should reintroduce

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Bison

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back into the prairies in very large numbers.